Sanctuary

by SHILO NIZIOLEK

It began with cracks in the glass. Miniature pine trees began sprouting from the screen. The cracks turned into roots and the roots into trunks and the trunks into trees.

I took the phone to my cellular provider.

“What do you make of this?” I asked. The tech was wearing a bright orange sweater vest.

He barely looked up from his tablet. “It appears,” he paused, “that your phone is growing trees.” He tossed my phone into the trash and handed me a replacement.

I held my new glossy screen in the palm of my hand, happy to again find the right angles in place, the keys usable, my peach complexion reflecting off the glass of the screen. I glanced at the trash bin on my way out the door. The tips of the pines were just beginning to peer over the edge.

On my walk home through the steel labyrinth of the city I thought I felt a tree following me home in the mirrored buildings. Each time I turned around there were only people, heads down, the light from their phones streaming onto their sallow cheeks, shadows walking.

I entered my apartment and draped myself over the bed, pleased to see that unsightly greenery had not again sprouted from my phone. The charcoal walls reflected nothing back at me.

For hours I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled, the light shifting from yellow to pink to night. I fell asleep with my phone in my hand. I awoke to the sensation of a thousand little slivers protruding from my hands. Stumbling to the bathroom, I clicked on the unnatural light. In my palm where my phone had slept grew a tiny bonsai, the roots raising clean from my skin. A kraken in the night.

Sitting down on the cool porcelain ridge of my bathtub, I watched as the wiry branches crept out.

“There is no sunshine for you here,” I heard myself say.

My eyes felt pushed back in my skull, as if looking at my own body from a great distance.

This isn’t happening.

I shook my head, bringing myself back into my body.

I’d heard of cases like this, but I was determined not to let it happen to me. I barely even use my phone, I thought, reaching for the tweezers behind the porcelain sink. I pried each root, one by one, from the lining of my skin and flushed the bonsai down the toilet. My skin closed back up, unmarred. When I clicked off the light, I followed the faint glow of the streetlight illuminating my steps to the bed. I felt my arms begin to itch, as if fire ants had tunneled into my bones. By the light of my phone, I saw the yellow creep of aspen leaves, littering what should have been my lightly freckled skin, making a home.

I grabbed my phone and keys, slipped on shoes and covered myself in my afghan, wincing at the pain as it stretched over the miniature trees.

I hailed a cab but when the light from the street shone on me, he said, “I’m sorry. I can’t help you.” Looking down, I saw what he saw. Bright yellow leaves, tendrils really, stretching out at the edges of the afghan, pushing through the openings of my grandmother’s yarn.

He sped away, as if I was contagious. A mossy virus under rising sun.

I ran the twenty blocks to the closest emergency room, but by the time I arrived miniature elms had taken away my opposable thumbs. Standing outside the sliding doors I asked Google, “How fast do elm trees grow?”

A robotic voice replied, “The American elm grows fast in any environment.”

I groaned before stepping through the open doors.

I crossed to the front desk, let out a hiccup, and a gum tree sapling peeled out from the top of my head. Little green spiky gum balls hung at the ends of my short blond hair like beads or snake heads on a marble statue.

The woman at the front desk took one look at me, opened the swinging white doors, and bellowed, “We’ve got another grower out here!”

An entourage of medical staff came filtering through the doors, ushering me back outside the hospital as quickly as possible. One with a giant pair of shears trimmed the trees from my arms, head, and thumbs. The trees planted symmetrically in perfectly manicured squares of grass between slabs of sidewalk all seemed to shimmy their leaves with each cut, as if in collective pain. A quiet protest that I felt attuned to, like the rattling of the leaves was happening somewhere in the depths of my chest. A man in a green doctor’s mask yelled for someone to call the bus and a bright yellow school bus came screeching around the corner.

“What is happening to me?” I whispered through the cacophony around me.

A female doctor with kind eyes took my hand, momentarily empty of trees. “Unfortunately, once it starts it can’t be reversed. There is no cure. The more we chop them down the faster they grow, but we are going to take you to a sanctuary. A place to rest.”

Tears welled and fell. I looked down to the sound of tiny pine cones bouncing off the pavement and rolling into the street.

My hand pulled from hers as I was lifted onto the bus by large sturdy hands. When I turned to look the man in the eyes, he averted his gaze. Was he ashamed he couldn’t do more for me? Imagining what the roots looked like underneath my clothes? I stumbled on the steps of the bus, found it full of others in various stages of growth.

There was a teenage boy, red maple leaves unfurling from his ears, and next to him a toddler whose face was coated in a thick layer of moss, building up the more he wept. Outside the toddler’s window, a woman with long brown hair stooped, her shoulders bent into the arm of an orderly as they shook.

“I just,” she choked, “the tablet helped keep him busy. I was just so tired.” She wailed and the toddler, stiff with bark, couldn’t turn his body to take one last look.

 The last three rows of seats had been removed to make way for what used to be a large burly man. Where his face had been was now a Douglas fir; only a golden red beard and drowsily blinking blue eyes remained. No lips for me to kiss if I wished it.

I sat down in an empty seat. I felt my legs melding together, the trunks of my tree getting heavier with each corner we took as we sped away, our bulk making the bus list to the left. 

Only a twenty-minute drive outside the city, we came across rows and rows of sun-dappled hills, a stream running through their curves.

I had to be carried off the bus by orderlies. On the short drive the gum tree had grown back, taken root in my skull. My legs bound themselves to one another, my lips turned to a grainy bark. Spiky gum balls sprouted lime green from my skin.

They placed each of us in nice rows along the stream bed, soaking up the water. My arms turned to branches as the day stretched out its limbs into night. When I awoke in the morning a pile of my clothes lay shredded next to me. My shoes, scattered to the left and right, looked as if they’d had small bombs placed inside them and were ripped from front to back. By noon, another bus arrived and a small orderly went around with a trash bag, collecting our discarded material items.

I felt nothing. I didn’t need them anymore. I stretched my body towards the sunlight as it set at the west. I could feel my roots burrowing deeper into the ground, searching out mystery below me, the depths of which I couldn’t have fathomed before. I felt a glimmer of the desire to know deeper, but it drifted away into the night.

We’ve been here awhile now. Our trunks connected by the elaborate network of roots below the ground. Our downloads more natural, more alive than ever before. There are no screens left to scroll, memes to be liked, shows to binge. Only the endless scroll of sky.

Yesterday they brought a man. He looked like someone I might have loved. They laid him at the base of my body; bright red and white mushrooms popped out of the lining of his skin. Already he is more moss than man. The mushrooms spread, unfurl across my trunk. Now this is what I call making love, I think, before my mind drifts off, buoyed by the frequency of the wind.